Backstory: Our household is comprised of three adults (myself, Quin, the roomie) and one 8-year-old (son of the roomie, hereafter referred to as the kiddo). Quin and I act as guardians, and we more-or-less operate as a family unit. There are some struggles in that, but not necessarily any more difficult that “traditional” families. Also for the record, I’m not a Buddhist practitioner.

The kiddo has religious views/values that differ from everyone else in the house. Recently, he told Quin & I that we’re going to hell. We were slightly blindsided by this, but all the adults are in agreement that, while we want to give him freedom to explore his own values, we also don’t randomly want him telling people they’re going to hell. People tend to not take kindly to that. In any event, although I do a decent job of talking to people about their religious practice, I fumbled through this encounter because I was rather taken aback by it. I dealt with it by basically saying that I disagree and let the matter drop. His usual response to disagreement about God is “It’s true, I’m not lying. I learned it at church.”